The Clinical Research Center for Communicative Disorders in Children, comprising investigators from several medical and scientific disciplines, was established eight years ago. During this period Center investigators have developed and applied new approaches to the detection and understanding of communication disorders in children. In the proposed continuation of the Center, we are building on the knowledge gained in the currently ongoing projects to further implement the goals of improving diagnostic methods, and of developing knowledge that will be of value in the treatment and management of children with hearing and communication disorders. These studies will be carried out through the Core and four projects using a combination of behavioral electrophysiolgic and brain imaging techniques to examine various key aspects of normal and aberrant hearing and language development. The Core encompasses those services which are utilized by all of the projects. The primary functions of the Core are: (1) to recruit and maintain subjects required for specific projects; (2) to perform physical, neurologic and otoscopic evaluations on the study subjects; (3) to provide screening/diagnostic ABR and audiologic evaluations for infants and young children; and (4) to provide psychometric assessments of language and cognitive development. Project 2 will examine the effects of otitis media on children's communication competencies. Both global and specific measures of auditory, speech, language and cognitive abilities will be studied from term through four years of age in children whose middle ear status will be assessed at regular intervals. Project 4 will study the mismatch negativity as a probe of automatic and preattentive cortical auditory processing in normal, high risk and language-impaired infants and children. Project 5 will investigate the effects of hearing loss and amplification using personal hearing aids on Cortical Auditory Event-Related Potential probes of the audibility and discriminability of bandlimited and speech stimuli. Project 6 employs a powerful new technique that combines source analysis of event related potentials (ERPs) with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to accomplish spatiotemporal localization of electrical indices of acoustic and linguistic processing within the brain in individual normal and language impaired children. The Center serves as a multidisciplinary resource for continuing research in education in the area of communication disorders in children at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and its affiliated institutions.
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